The Passing of an Era

To The Editor:
I don’t want to sound like Burt Lancaster in the Louis Malle 1980 film Atlantic City, but the news when I got here this year is that Busch’s, the granddaddy of the big seafood restaurants on this little stretch of barrier islands, is going to be knocked down in order to make way for more condos. Lancaster, playing a washed up former mob go-fer, is reminiscing with a young punk on the boardwalk about the glory days and says, “You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean back then.”
It was just five years ago that the owners of Busch’s, the fifth generation of the family to run the restaurant over its 128 consecutive years of operation, attempted in a press interview to put a stop to fears and rumors that the landmark restaurant was going to be sold or demolished: “There are no plans, not even a thought, of making Busch’s into condos.”
Well, the allegedly nonexistent thought is a reality and so are the condo blueprints, and it looks like the sixth generation of the family that was waiting in the wings, teenagers Logan and Tyler, already talented in art of cleaning crabs and stacking dishes, is now on the road to becoming something more generic, perhaps accountants or tax attorneys.
Coming to America, George and Anna Busch founded Busch’s on the southern end of this barrier island as a small hotel in 1882. That was just six years after Lt. Col. George Custer made the mistake of taking on the forces of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in the Battle of Little Big Horn.
What made Crazy Horse even crazier in that battle was the new flood of white prospectors heading westward following the discovery of gold on Sioux lands, producing a string of broken treaties and the corralling of previously freewheeling Indians onto reservations.
Speaking of things related to fire water, John Dougherty reported in Beachcomber magazine that it was George Busch’s brother Adolphus, similarly entrepreneurial, who headed farther west and joined the Anheuser Brewery, “becoming the ‘Busch’ in Anheuser-Busch.”
Adolphus rose through the ranks the smart way, by marrying the owner’s daughter. He wed Eberhard Anheuser’s daughter, Lilly, in 1861. To fully seal the deal, Adolphus’s brother married Lilly’s sister in the same service, providing Mr. Adolphus with two newly minted Busch sons-in-law on the same day.
Three years later, Adolphus began working at his father-in-law’s brewery. In 1880, he became president of the company upon Eberhard’s death that is today the largest brewing company in America.
In Sea Isle, so top secret is Busch’s recipe for deviled crab, the restaurant’s long-running signature dish, that the owners said several years ago that the recipe is so closely guarded that “no more than six people have used it in 90 years.” It’s like the Vatican’s covert archives.
The other big news is that we were sitting on our deck the last few weeks and watching 700,000 cubic yards of newly dredged sand being pumped onto our storm-damaged beach, at a cost per cubic yard of $7.02.
Reimbursement for three-quarters of that $4,914,000 price tag is supposed to come from state and federal governments, both of which are broke. It’s an expense that many environmentalists and my most doctrinaire libertarian friends aren’t happy about. Both say to let the ocean go where it wants. Easy to say if you don’t own a house on the beach or a boardwalk fudge shop.
In fishing news, stripers are biting like crazy on clams in the early morning surf. No BP oil yet.
RALPH R. REILAND
Pittsburgh, Pa.
(ED. NOTE: The author is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh and a columnist with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.)